Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WhiskTrackGP (Real-time tracking of whisker kinematics for closed-loop neuroscientific experiments)
Reporting period: 2017-09-01 to 2018-08-31
Whisker tracking in mice is a major behavioral-experiment paradigm as a direct modeling system of sensorimotor adaptation in the human cerebellum. The main challenge lies in its steep speed and accuracy requirements: hair-like structures moving at high speeds need to be tracked accurately to ascribe whisker motion to cerebellar function. Various tools are available, yet, all fail in terms of computational time and/or acquisition frequency, which renders them unsuited both for offline and for real-time use. To address these limitations, we have developed WhiskTrackGP, a high-performance image-acquisition and -processing platform for cutting-edge neuroscientific experiments on behavior developed within the Neuroscience department of the Erasmus Medical Center. WhiskTrackGP is an advanced hardware/software platform that can recognize the kinematics of multiple whiskers simultaneously with minimal intervention from the experimenter. It is realized as powerful whisker-tracking software ported on a hardware-accelerated platform. We demonstrate offline video analysis in the order of 10,000x. WhiskTrackGP comprises a “one-stop shop” solution for labs and companies active in the field of behavioral studies. In terms of targeted markets, WhiskTrackGP aims at the neuroscience, pharmaceuticals and pharmacogenetics domains. The WhiskTrackGP system has been developed, optimized and extensively validated on real animal setups with impressive results. The software has also been developed with portability and extensibility in mind, to allow for future adaptations as well as migrating to faster hardware platforms, as technology and need scale. What is more, a market analysis has been conducted verifying our expectation that there is no real competition, since there are no other real-time systems on the market. The only competition are homebrew systems. Since these are not commercially available, their market potential should be neglected. This leads to the conclusion that the markets for the WhiskTrackGP are unexplored. The survey indicates that more than 72% of the respondents are either using an inferior system and are looking for an upgrade or do not perform whisker-tracking experiments but plan to do so in the near future. The positive feedback in the survey, combined with the excellent performance of the product in our lab, and the positive reviews from collaborators, provides us with the confidence that the launch of WhiskTrackGP on the market will pay off very well. Following a business analysis and sales predictions, the 10-year net revenue for WhiskTrackGP is projected to be around 2.9M USD.